Teacher's brainwave launches tutoring tool

Entrepreneurs often come up with a business idea to solve a problem and Rumaisa Mohani was no different. The teacher speaks about how she devised the idea which won her an award in last month's GIST's I Dare Business Plan Competition.

Rumaisa Mohani decided to launch E-Aid to tutor students online. Delores Johnson / The National

Rumaisa Mohani has worked as a teacher in the UAE for the past 17 years. But she often struggled to find the time to tutor students outside of work. So when she heard of the I Dare Business Plan Competition run by the organisation GIST - Global Innovation through Science and Technology - which was held in Dubai last month, she had just the idea: an online tutoring portal, which won the team she led the award for "best female entrepreneur". She speaks about the next step.

q Tell me about the idea behind E-Aid.

a It is online tutoring. Teachers are very busy. They cannot go and at the end the student cannot get teachers to teach them, especially at exam time. [And in some parts of the world] teachers cannot go to students' homes due to transport problems, weather conditions [or] political situations.

What gave you the idea?

I was always very busy and I had students calling me all the time [asking me to] teach them, but I had no time, so I decided to start this.

What is the next step for you?

The [U$15,000 prize grant] will be used in the project. We have so much demand from people and lots of people are coming to us. They want us to be very fast about this. We will start this quickly.

What kind of time scale are you looking at to get it up and running?

It will take maybe two or three months because now it is the holidays. We will develop everything, and we are looking to the exam time, which starts in November, especially the British exams. That's the main time period for us. We will be ready maybe in September or October. That's the time when there is a huge rush.

How does it all work?

The teachers will be an expert in the subject, be qualified and technology trained. We will have our own technology. We will have our own software we are designing. We explained everything in our presentation … with diagrams and so on. [Initially] it will be available only in the evening, but we want it to be full-time, so we will have a programme where within one year we will hire online teachers from all over the world so we can cover world timings, like 24/7, because the teachers will be in different time zones.

Do you plan to give up your day job or are you going to continue working when E-Aid is up and running?

I am a teacher, so it is a half-day job. That means I can devote time to it. And actually jobs are good for us, because we will be in touch with our clients like this.

* Gillian Duncan